Of free-ranging ranchers and media meltdowns

Fox news and the neolibertarian blogosphere erupted in high dudgeon over the federal government’s efforts to force Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy pay the national treasury for grazing his cattle on public lands.

Jon Stewart deftly skewered Fox for its sudden support for freeloading off the public purse, but the real meltdown came when Cliven Bundy expressed his views of black people — views that hadn’t been spoken aloud on Main Street in the last, oh, forty years.

Cliven Bundy questioned whether black Americans were “better off as slaves” or “better off under government subsidy.” His remarks initially appeared in a New York Times article on April 23.

What amazes us is the fact that Fox & Co. hadn’t vetted Bundy for views shared by many of their audience, but could only be voiced in loaded language.

That Bundy came form Nevada’s cow counties should’ve sounded an alert somewhere in some newsroom [or maybe not, thanks to the relentless purging of media of older journalists. . .].

We spent time back in Nevada during Bundy’s formative years, and when we arrived in 1966, there wasn’t a single black dealer or cocktail server in any of the casinos in Glitter Gulch or along the Strip. Rich white gamblers for Texas, Louisiana, and many from New York liked it that way.

Esnl spent some of the happiest times of his youth among hill people, high plains ranchers, desert rats, and other assorted end-of-the-roaders in Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Arizona, and New Mexico, enjoying fascinating conversations with men and women from an amazing array of backgrounds.

We recognize now that our reception amonst some of them would’ve been a lot different were our skin more melanin-rich and our less less thin and rather limp.

While two women we knew from imeccably WASPy backgrounds, they’d married or were openly cohabiting with native American men in the 1950s and 60s whilst living in regions voting strongly to the right. But a good many also held peculiar views on folks who didn’t hale from Northern Europe, sometimes overtly expressed, otherwise in telling words accompanied by winks, nods, shoulder shrugs, and other such somatic semantics.

The other irony is that Bundy’s ongoing grazing grab is the very embodiment of the otherwise wrongly premised notion of the “tragedy of the commons” that lies at the heart of the neolibertarian rationale.

Bundy’s views on black people came as no surprise to us. But the simple fact that the antics of a cow county curmudgeon had grabbed national headlines left us saddened at the utter collapse of political discourse in the mainstream media.

One response to “Of free-ranging ranchers and media meltdowns”

Fortunately, the average viewer of Fox News is now 70 years-old, and thinking people get their news from the internet, where Fox News is dead last. Which leaves me hopeful that Fox News will either change or disappear.